Hump, Marry, Kill: The Best Detective Show on TV (Psych!)

Hump, Marry, Kill: The Best Detective Show on TV (Psych!)

Hump: Here's my Usher-style confession: I still haven’t finished season one of True Detective. Trust me, I know I should. It’s in my DVR, just begging to be cued up so I can join the world in discussing magnificent three-minute-long tracking shots, and why HBO chose to submit it as a drama series (as opposed to a miniseries) at the Emmys.

Here’s the thing, though: Not that my life is as dark and depressing as those of the characters on TD, but sometimes, at the end of a long day spent sitting in a cube, staring at a glowing rectangle for hours on end, surrounded by stale air and white noise, one needs some truly mindless entertainment. A gritty detective series filmed through the Instagram Amaro filter is just a little too...intense.

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Now that I’ve taken you on that incredible setup, allow me to share the point: I found a most delightful piece of the aforementioned mindless fluff, which just ended its eight-season run this week, and I bet you’ve never seen an episode. USA’s Psych is also a detective show, set in Santa Barbara, about a charismatic guy with what he describes as “heightened observational skills” who pretends to be psychic for the purpose of solving crimes with his best friend.

If the premise sounds silly, that’s because it is. But the giving-it-his-all Shawn (James Roday) and his begrudging — but secretly loving it — partner Gus (Dulé Hill) makes this the perfect show to watch when I want to feel like I’m using my brain, but also zone out. Plus, the first six seasons are on Netflix, so it’s the perfect thing to cue up when your DVR is filled with trips to Serious Town, population: your full mental capacity.

P.S. #Sorrynotsorry that the Psych theme song will never leave your head. Ever.

Marry: Four and three and two and one [cue jazzy piano theme], watching Broad City is loads of…fine. I won’t attempt to rhyme or rap like my pretend besties Abbi and Ilana. What I will do is ask them again to please (!) let me write for the show — I’ll come up with better ideas than that last one, promise. For example: When I first moved to New York, I interned for someone who had just gotten a lap band, but would still eat too much at lunch. This resulted in him having to throw up either in a plastic bag at the table or on the street on the walk back to the office. And, since it's NYC, people either ignored us or took pictures — no one ever stopped to ask if he was alright. (Yes, this actually happened.) My boss would vomit almost every single day in front of me and the general public. (See? I told you. Good stuff!) If you didn’t catch Broad City's first season, which ended on Wednesday, do yourself a huge favor and find a way to watch it. And, when you’re done with that, do yourself another solid and watch the web series that led to the show on their YouTube channel.

Dare I make the claim thatBroad City is Seinfeld for the millennial generation: a show about nothing that ends up being about something. The sh*t Abbi and Ilana deal with on their path to self-actualization and full-blown adulthood is stuff with which we’ve all dealt. It may even be — and I hope my father isn’t reading this — *better* than Seinfeld, because you actually care about Abbi and Ilana. They’d probably even win a turf war against Jerry, Elaine, Kramer, and George. Yeah, I said it. Step off, UWS yuppies. There are two new broads in town. And they’ll be back for another season.

Kill: Hey, have you guys been watching Star-Crossed on The CW? You know, that show about a love triangle between Julie Taylor and Hastings Ruckle from Friday Night Lights and Liam from the 90210 reboot? Where they’re literally “star-crossed” lovers, because one of the guys is an alien, and another is human? No? Okay, I’ll stop talking. Wait…what if I told you that Becky from FNL is there, too? Still no? Got it.